Friday, January 29, 2016

I saw a man in the parking
lot of a school I visited and he was bent over staring at the bumper of my 1993
Ford F-150 pick-up truck.

"Nice truck," he
said.

"Gets me around."

The man sighed, shook his
head and laughed. "Just look at that bumper, solid metal." He banged
it with his knuckle. "All metal and chrome."

I nodded. "You say it
gets you around? Where to and where from?"

"Well, I said, "It
got me out of a mosquito ditch I was in."

"How'd it get in
there?"

I laughed, remembering.
"My best friend drove it into the ditch."

"What'd he think it was,
a flying horse? Any more?"

"Well, it was in a
hurricane and made it through but my neighbor across the street, well, his RV
got picked up in the air and when it came down it flattened his mom's
caddy."

He smiled. "What
else?"

"Well, let's see. My
wife gave it those racing stripes. They were made by our farm gate."

"Took it a little close,
eh?"

I nodded.

"Well I'll tell
ya," the man said, "one day you're going to thank this old gal for
saving ya when someone backs into ya."

Yesterday in the parking lot
at Publix I was remembering that funny old guy when, right then someone backed
into my F-150.

A loud grinding,
jaw-clenching crash.

The driver couldn't see out
of his back window because it was all steamed up but that didn't slow him down
any.

When I checked the damage the
score was Ford F-150 one, blind driver zero. His back end was crunched so bad
some of it fell off in the parking lot. "It wasn't my fault," he
sputtered, "I was just let out of the hospital, and now look what I've
gone and done."

The old gal, my Ford F-150
didn't have a mark on her even though my jaw was still quivering from the jolt.

Gerald Hausman calls himself a "native of the world" after living in so many places in the United States and the West Indies. He spent more than twenty years in New Mexico where many of his American Indian folktales were collected and published. Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1945, Hausman has been a storyteller almost since birth. His more than 70 books attest to his love of folklore, a passion instilled by his mother who painted the portraits of Native American chiefs. During his thirty-five years as a storyteller, Gerald has entertained children of all ages at such places as The Kennedy Center, Harvard University, St John's College and in schools from one end of the country to the other. Five audio books have come out in recent years and two of Gerald's books have been made into animated and folkloric films. His books have also been translated into a dozen foreign languages.